This has been the most authoritative and influential biography of Woolf,
though it has been superseded by the more scholarly 1996 biography by Hermione
Lee. Quentin Bell was Woolfs nephew, her sister Vanessas son.
He and his sister Angelica inherited the Virginia Woolf Estate, controlling
access to her papers.

Many Woolf scholars view this as the closest we
have to a definitive Woolf biography. A newer biography by Mitchell Leaska,
Granite and Rainbow (1998), emphasizes the links between Woolf's life and
works (see my personal collection). Both Lee and Leaska published
monographs about Woolf's novels in 1977.

Leaska, Mitchell.Granite and Rainbow: The Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1998.

Leaska also has written a 1977
book about Woolf’s novels, an 1970 book about To the Lighthouse, and
has edited some of her journals and letters.The Salmon Library has all of these, but does not have the new biography
(I do).

Marder’s focus is on Woolf’s last ten years and the books the wrote then,
with a lot of emphasis on water imagery and her suicide by drowning.
Marder also wrote a book about Woolf and feminism that the library owns, Virginia
Woolf: Feminism and Art (1968).

Woolf often spoke of writing her autobiography, but these
unpublished autobiographical writings are as close as we have to formal
autobiography. The earliest, "Reminiscences," was written at the birth of
her first nephew, Julian Bell, supposedly as a biography of her sister Vanessa.
The latest, "A Sketch of the Past," was written near the end of her life,
apparently as the beginning of a formal autobiography. The rest are sketches
she read to members of the Memoir Club, who met regularly to read such essays.